Tag: The Baffler

With the launch of its streaming music service, Google-owned YouTube is revealing itself as the kind of “troublesome, exploitative” intermediary it promised it would never be, Jacob Silverman writes at The Baffler.

Applying for a job you need but don’t really want is bad enough. But now “Zappos, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Amazon, is going to occupy the unemployed for months with (mostly futile) attempts to become virtual ‘friends’ with the online shoe retailer,” Noah McCormack writes at The Baffler.

American intellectuals have had plenty of cause for despair in these Roman decades of international and domestic imperialism against different ways of thought and life. At an April launch party in San Francisco for the 22nd volume of the countercultural magazine The Baffler, anthropologist and contributor David Graeber explained some of how this happened and praised a nationwide grass-roots effort to reverse the trend.

John Summers, editor-in-chief of the critical, satirical magazine The Baffler, appeared on Boston’s WGBH News to introduce his journal to television audiences, saying that when people ask what the publication is about, he “remind[s] them that this sort of thing existed for a long time in the American cultural scene.”

In a late 2012 PBS series called “Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide,” the lauded New York Times columnist and professional flake “glosses” the harmful “utopian vision” of free-market globalization sold to Americans in a 1980 television broadcast by neoliberal economist Milton Friedman, Anne Elizabeth Moore writes in The Baffler.

Postmodern confusion about how populist movements take hold and flourish caused Occupy Wall Street to “deconstruct” itself in a frenzied obsession with nonhierarchical structures, a disdain for demands, and other trappings of “lazy, reflexive libertarianism,” author and columnist Thomas Frank writes in The Baffler.

Thomas Frank, master of sarcasm and chief polemicist for Harper’s Magazine, is a treasure of the anxious, aggravated left. He recently made a demonstration of happy defiance in the face of accelerating social disaster in an interview with The Financial Times.

As American communities crumble under the weight of corporate capitalism, leaders attempt to convince their fellow citizens that the magical quality of “vibrancy” dwelling in arts districts—not universal health care, financial regulation or public works projects—will get their towns back on their feet.

With the revival of The Baffler, former WSJ columnist and current Harper’s Magazine contributor Thomas Frank reveals that success in Washington and big business has everything to do with belonging to the right pack, especially if that pack was dead wrong about the economy.

Dissident lefties, rejoice! After a long hiatus resulting from an office fire and a host of other problems, Thomas Frank’s fearless cultural journal, The Baffler, is due to return this summer online and in print in all of its caustic, critical glory. (more)